How to be an expert on anything in six months

11/03/2008

The Blogger's Secret: How to be an expert on anything

The Blogger's Secret is a method and a system for developing and sharpening your expertise on a specific topic. It can be expressed very simply:

Write about a topic twice a day for six months and you will be recognized as an expert in that field.

Hidden inside this simple method is a system for making it possible to sustain this output and to weave a set of connections (in your work and in the world) that go beyond a simple cut and paste of other people's words and ideas.

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This weblog has been an attempt to put these ideas into practice. It's been a demonstration of systematic and deliberate efforts to write with authority while still learning what there is to learn. It's not currently being actively updated, but will stay online. (See the posting on "closure" to understand that ending a project is as important as starting it.)

The underlying idea is that you can become expert simply by being persistent and methodical and public in your efforts to learn. One constraint that is clear at the start is that your blog constructed for this purpose cannot be about anything and everything that comes to mind; as soon as someone describes it as eclectic or has a hard time pinning down what you are doing, you have strayed from a purpose. That doesn't mean that random synaptic firings are bad, just that they have no place in a Blogger's Secret style blog.

An advantage to this style, however, is that you don't need to know what you are expert at until you become that expert. The unique writing atmosphere of weblogs means that you and your readers and the search engines will guide you there. Once you have pinpointed where you have a unique expertise, you can adapt what you write to explore it at more depth.